Secret hacking session – full scans, direct path reads, object level checkpoints, ORA-8103s!

August 6, 2011 By 11 Comments
FREE STUFF !!! FREE STUFF !!! FREE STUFF !!!
At the last week’s Expert Oracle Exadata virtual conference both me and Kerry touched the topic of how smart scan (and direct path read) decisions are done for each scanned segment during the SQL execution runtime – and not by the optimizer during the optimization phase.
I got a few follow-up questions about this yesterday and I also recall a similar question after my Understanding Exadata Performance Metrics presentation I did for UKOUG in London in April.
I think this is a topic which deserves some deeper coverage and so I decided I’ll do another secret hacking session on Tuesday 9th August (2011) 9-11am PDT.
The topics (hopefully) covered will be:
  1. How do full table scans work
  2. How and why do the “ORA-8103: object no longer exists” happen
  3. How does Oracle (11g) decide between a buffered full table scan and a direct path read scan (plus smart scan in Exadata)
  4. What’s the difference between an object_id and data_object_id?
  5. and more!
Note that while I do touch the Exadata topic a bit too, this session is generic and useful for anyone full scanning tables on any Oracle database… :)
This event is free and you can sign up here:

P.S. I will record the event and publish the video too. So if you’re in Australia or Hong Kong, no need to stay up late ;-)

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle Tagged With: , ,

Training Schedule for 2011 and Public Appearances

July 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Online Seminars
A lot of people have asked me about whether I’d be doing any more seminars in the future. And the answer is yes – at least this year (might be too busy running a company the next year ;-)

I have finally put together the schedule for my 2011 seminars. In addition to the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting seminar I will also deliver my Advanced Oracle SQL Tuning and Oracle Partitioning and Parallel Execution for Performance seminars, which I have done only onsite in past.

So, check out the seminars page:
Also don’t forget the Expert Oracle Exadata virtual conference next week!

Public Appearances

Oracle OpenWorld 2. October
  • I will talk about Large-Scale Consolidation onto Oracle Exadata: Planning, Execution, and Validation
  • Session ID 09355

Maybe I’ll lurk around the UKOUG venue as well in december ;-)

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle Tagged With: , , , , ,

The First Exadata Virtual Conference in the World!

July 4, 2011 By 6 Comments

We have been secretly planning something with Kerry Osborne – and now it’s official – we will host The First Exadata Virtual Conference in the World, on 3-4 August 2011.

This conference takes place a couple of weeks after our Expert Oracle Exadata book is published (on 18. July – check out the awesome new cover design). So, we thought it’d be a good idea to run this conference, where we can explain some things in a different format, do live demos and answer questions that attendees have.

On the first day Kerry and Randy will talk about some serious fundamentals of Exadata, like how Exadata Smart Scan Offloading works and how to make the IO resource manager work for you (especially important in mixed workload consolidated environments).

And on the second day we’ll dig even deeper, with Andy Colvin talking about how to survive Exadata patching (he has patched more Exadatas than anyone else I know) and me following up with some complex performance troubleshooting stories I’ve encountered recently (trust me – there’s a LOT of issues to troubleshoot ;-)

About the Conference:

Since its release, Oracle Exadata quickly became a hit. Due to the relative “youth” of Exadata technology and internal behavior changes introduced with frequent patch-sets, there’s not much up-to-date quality technical information and know-how available to public. This virtual conference brings you a chance to learn from the leading Exadata experts, from their experience of working with real Exadata environments, from Exadata V1 to the latest X2-8. Additionally, there is plenty of Q&A time scheduled, so you can also get answers to your Exadata-related questions.

The speakers are probably some of the most experienced Exadata consultants in the world, in the field of Exadata deployment, migration, performance, and troubleshooting. Also, Kerry, Randy and Tanel are the authors of the Expert Oracle Exadata book published by Apress in July 2011.

Dates:

  • 3-4 August 2011

Location:

  • Online (or should I say “the Cloud” ;-)

Duration:

  • 8am – 12pm (PST) on both days – 2 x 1.5h sessions on each day, with Q&A sessions and a break in between

Speakers:

  • Kerry Osborne, Randy Johnson, Andy Colvin from Enkitec
  • Tanel Poder from right here :-)

All of the speakers are hard-core hands-on professionals, having worked on many different real-life (production) Exadata environments of their clients. Enkitec dudes didn’t stop there, they bought a half rack for themselves, just for playing around with it. Yeah (+1 from me), some people buy a red hot Ferrari, some buy a red hot computer rack with an X on it :-)

Price:

  • 375 USD (early bird until 22. July), 475 regular price

More information, abstracts and registration:

I don’t think you’ll find an Exadata learning opportunity like this from anywhere else (and any time soon), especially considering the price!

This conference is so hot, that one of the attendees managed to sign up to it even before I had published this page to the world! :-)


Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle Tagged With: , , ,

Advanced RAC Training by Oracle RAC expert Riyaj Shamsudeen

June 30, 2011 By 7 Comments

If you’ve troubleshooted (or tuned) RAC then you probably already know Riyaj Shamsudeen and his Orainternals blog & website (links below).

Anyway, since I started delivering my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting classes some years ago, many people asked whether I would do a similar class for RAC. I had deliberately left out the RAC-specific stuff from my troubleshooting material, because it’s a very wide and complex topic and I feel like before trying to master RAC troubleshooting, you should master troubleshooting of regular single instance databases anyway. I realized that I didn’t have the time to build (and maintain) yet another set of trainig material, especially on so complex topic as RAC performance & troubleshooting. 

So, having seen Riyaj’s impressive work and his presentations at various conferences, I asked whether he would be interested in building a RAC troubleshooting class, going from fundamentals to advanced topics – and he said yes. By now we are that far that I’m happy to announce the first Advanced RAC online seminars by Riyaj Shamsudeen (split across two weeks of online sessions, 4-hours per day, in end of august and september).

We initially called the seminar “Advanced RAC Troubleshooting” but then realized, that there are some closely related non-troubleshooting topics to be covered, like fundamental concepts, internals and also how to configure RAC for performance (so that you wouldn’t have to troubleshoot performance later :-)

We’ll use the same infrastructure and seminar philosophy as I do in my own online seminars, it’s just that this is Riyaj’s material and he will deliver it too.

You can read more about the seminar content, dates and sign up at the seminars page:

Seminars:

Riyaj’s blog:

Riyaj’s website (articles, slides etc):

 

Let the RAC hacking begin! ;-)

 

Filed Under: Oracle Tagged With: , , , ,

Reminder and Public Appearances 2011

April 6, 2011 By 2 Comments

First, a reminder – my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 online seminar starts next week already. Last chance to sign up, I can accept registrations until Sunday :-)

I won’t do another AOT seminar before Oct (or Nov) this year. More details and sign-up here:

I have rescheduled my Advanced SQL Tuning and Partitioning & Parallel Execution for Performance seminars too. I will do them in September/October. Unfortunately I’m too busy right now to do them before the summer.

Public Appearances:

  • I will be speaking at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event in London on 18th April
  • I have submitted a few papers for Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco as well (end of Sep/beginning of Oct), all about Exadata. Let’s see how it goes, but I’ll be there anyway, which means that I’ll probably show up at the Oracle Closed World event too!

And that’s all the travel I will do this year…

Virtual Conferences:

I’ll soon announce the 2nd EsSN virtual conference too ;-)

Free online stuff:

Perhaps in a month or so I will do another hacking session (I’ll plan 2 hours this time, 1 hour isn’t nearly enough for going deep). The topic will probably be about low-level details of SQL plan execution internals… stay tuned!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Update, things of interest and a couple of blogs to check out

March 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

tech.E2SN secret hacking session on Tuesday 22nd March:

Just in case you missed it – there’s still chance to sign up to my tomorrow’s ORA-4031 and shared pool hacking session. I initially planned to limit the attendees to 100 per event (as the limited GotoWebinar package is cheaper that way) but over 100 people had signed up for the US event on the day of announcement, even before it was 8am in California, so I figured I should invest a bit more and allow more people attend. So far over 500 people have signed up (total for both events). If you haven’t done so, you can sign up here:

Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting online seminar Deep Dives 1-5  on 11-15 April:

The next AOT deep dives (1-5) will start in 3 weeks, on 11-15 April. (and 6-10 will be on 9-13 May).

Check the details here:

Blogs to check out:

Andrey Nikolaev has done some serious low-level research on Oracle latches and KGX mutexes and he also presented his work this year at Hotsos Symposium (I missed his session as I was stuck in JFK instead of attending the conference on that day):

Porus Havewala is quite a Grid Control and OEM enthusiast. If you are into OEM & GC, check out his blog:

Future events:

  • I will be speaking at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event on 18th April
  • I will announce some more Virtual Conferences pretty soon!!! Very interesting topics and good speakers – including (but not limited to) some serious Exadata technical contents!
Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle Tagged With: , ,

ORA-4031 errors, contention, cursor management issues and shared pool fragmentation – free secret seminar!

March 16, 2011 By 18 Comments

Free stuff! Free stuff! Free stuff! :-)

The awesome dudes at E2SN have done it again! (and yes, Tom, this time the “we at E2SN Ltd” doesn’t mean only me alone ;-)

On Tuesday 22nd March I’ll hold two (yes two) Secret Oracle Hacking Sessions – about ORA-04031: unable to allocate x bytes of shared memory errors, cursor management issues and other shared pool related problems (like fragmentation). This event is free for all! You’ll just need to be fast enough to register, both events have 100 attendee limit (due to my GotoWebinar accont limitations).

I am going to run this online event twice, so total 200 people can attend (don’t register for both events, please). One event is in the morning (my time) to cater for APAC/EMEA region and the other session is for EMEA/US/Americas audience.

The content will be the same in both sessions. There will be no slides (you cant fix your shared pool problems with slides!) but there will be demos, scripts, live examples and fun (for the geeks among us anyway – others go and read some slides instead ;-)!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 Online Deep Dives in April and May 2011

February 28, 2011 By 3 Comments

Due to a lot interest I’m going to do another run of my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 Online Deep Dive seminars in April and May (initially I had planned to do it no earlier than Sep/Oct…)

Check the dates & additional info out here:

P.S. People who already attended the AOT2 seminars last year – I will schedule the follow-up Q&A sessions in mid-March!

Filed Under: Oracle Tagged With: , , , , ,

A few more announcements…

October 27, 2010 By 1 Comment
Today’s hacking session was a success – 144 people signed up and around 100 attended – thank you!
  • I will do the next hacking session in November! Don’t know exact date yet, I’ll just need to find a free enough day… I think I’ll go deeper into internals next time to justify the “hacking” part in the name :-)
Last days for getting the early-bird rate at the first Virtual Conference about Systematic Oracle SQL Optimization with Cary Millsap, Jonathan Lewis, Kerry Osborne and me!
Additional Q & A sessions added into the package of my AOT2.0 seminars:
  • NB! As a fresh addition – the AOT2.0 seminar attendees can attend two additional 2 hour Q & A sessions after the seminars!
    • 2 hours in mid-December 2010 (TBD)
    • 2 hours in mid-January 2011 (TBD)
    • The idea is that when you put the new tools and knowledge into use in real life, there will likely be additional questions that arise. The extra Q&A sessions, where Tanel answers questions related to the seminar material (and do even more demos) should help you to get the most out of these seminars!
    • Existing and new attendees of AOT20 seminars, no action is needed from you. I’ll just send you a mail with proposed dates after the seminars…
  • Last chance to sign up to the first part of the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 Online Deep Dives (1-5 Nov)!
Filed Under: Oracle Tagged With:

Another (secret) hacking session with me – using Oracle Session Snapper for flexible troubleshooting (and fun)

October 25, 2010 By 13 Comments

And this time we have audio !!! (Wow!)

Following the huge success of my last hacking session, planned while drinking beer at Graham Woods OOW pre-party and delivered from Miracle’s massive Oracle Closed World event in Thirsty Bear (between drinking beers), I’m announcing another hacking session:

What: Using Session Snapper for flexible Oracle Performance Troubleshooting

When: Wednesday 27th Oct 9:00-10:00 AM PDT (US West coast / California time). Check what’s this in your time zone here

Where: Internet! -> Sign up here: http://tech.e2sn.com/secret

You’ll need to register fast and be “there” on time as my current GotoWebinar account only allow 100 attendees to log on… last time over 100 people signed up, but “luckily” less actually showed up, so nobody got left outside!

BTW, I have figured out what went wrong with audio last time and caused my voice in the end of presentation disappear). A program, which I accidentally launched via a keyboard shortcut, grabbed my Mic input to itself, so gotowebinar’s app couldn’t access it anymore.

See you soon!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,
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